More lay-offs at WOTC! [Merged]
- Thread starter jaults
- Start date
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It comes down to this
If you want those that were layed off to be retained and Wotc to continue with the level of 'support' or 'quality' however you define those things, please be willing to pay for it and ensure that a significant portion of your fellow customers would as well. Otherwise, you grand judgments come off as disingenuous and childish, as your asking those who pay the costs of production to sacrifice for your hobby. Thank you.
If you want those that were layed off to be retained and Wotc to continue with the level of 'support' or 'quality' however you define those things, please be willing to pay for it and ensure that a significant portion of your fellow customers would as well. Otherwise, you grand judgments come off as disingenuous and childish, as your asking those who pay the costs of production to sacrifice for your hobby. Thank you.
drakhe
First Post
JLXC said:
Hey, I can assure you that MOST people feel your way, but the decisions are mate by the suits and the suits DON'T to screw business and they definatly DON4T want to screw profit. That's just the whole deal.
WE GAMERS: wan't our game as interesting, abundant and (lets face it) cheap as possible, because we want fun, and as much off it as possible
THEM SUITS: have to face the governement (taxes, bla bla all these obligations), distributors, printers, stock space, salaries, ...
The thing is they are looking from a totaly different perspective. No matter how harsh this may sound, for the suits, the people that have to run a business, employees are just another whole where money is drained. SIMPLE FACT OF LIFE.
drakhe
First Post
Mark Plemmons said:
THANK YOU! Finaly someone used the O word. I've refrained so far of using this term as I've been a near victim 2 years ago and will be a victim by the end of this year and I've been scared, enraged, angry, ...
Why? Because: a it's the fad of the moment, all corporations are doing it. Believe me when I say that certain firms who'se core business is strategic outsourcing have themselves outsourced part of the company.
In the end nobody is actualy going to work for the firm they are doing the work for. In the end everybody is going to be outsourced. The scary thing is that outsourcing can only be profitable if the firm that handles the outsourcing can do the same job at a lower cost. What else is the point in outsourcing? Which in return means that quality HAS to drop!
I'll add one more scary thought: People are no longer allowed to care for their job. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY REAL: an ex-colleague who was outsourced 2 years ago but still works for us was warned off by his new employer to stop being concerned of his old job and start being more concerned with his new firm. They even penalized him for doing so (part of their salary is variable...)
SCARY!
Actually, WOTC definitely wasn't interested in killing off LUG or anything like that. It was more something like this:drakhe said:
1. LUG have the Star Trek license and the Dune license (they haven't published Dune though, due to the Herbert estate riding them real hard) and are bleeding money.
2. WOTC says "Hey, we want that Star Trek license. Let's buy the company that has it now." They ask Paramount if that would be OK with them, and Paramount say yes. Nothing is in writing though.
3. LUG says "OK, you can buy us. But we have this RPG that we've been working on forever and the fans are almost knocking over the doors. You'll have to promise you'll release it." WOTC replies, "sure".
4. WOTC pays the owners of LUG a bunch of money, assumes ownership and hires on the LUG staff as "WOTC South".
5. Paramount says "Hey, wait a minute! We don't want the same company making both a Star Wars and a Star Trek RPG! Let's yank the license from WOTC and give it to Decipher, the guys making the Trek CCG."
6. WOTC says "WTF? Darn, we should have gotten that promise in writing. OK, at least we got Dune out of it." WOTC releases a limited edition of the Dune RPG and promises to release a d20 version as well, and make a few supplements.
7. The Dune license runs out. With the upcoming Dune miniseries on Sci-fi Channel, the Herbert estate now wants a lot more money for the license. WOTC thinks "They caused a whole lot of problems for LUG by being picky about the license, and the Dune universe isn't *that* good a license. It ain't worth it.", and won't renew the license.
8. WOTC and Hasbro start going into the red, and decide to cut back on staff. Among those laid off by WOTC are most of the people that came on board when they bought LUG - they were basically hired to do Star Trek, and WOTC aren't doing Star Trek.
drakhe said:
Not necessarily true. One of the primary benefits of outsourcing is economy of scale. Is a medium sized non-tech business going to hire the staff to set up and run it's own HR department? The alternative is to pay another company to do it for them. Theoretically all that outsourcing company has to do is add a small amount of additional capacity and staff to their current, established, systems and give their clients access. The large outsourcing company can afford better equipment and software through volume licensing as well having significantly smaller implementation cost, thus providing more features for a lower price.
Why should a company in the publishing business (or almost any other business for that matter) require IT expertise to keep running?
Coreyartus
Explorer
The Quandry
I have just spent the last couple of hours reviewing this thread, and I think I finally realized something.
Think about this:
I work in the arts. Theatre to be exact. There has been a long-running debate on the national level that business practices have killed artistic expression, that a good theatre is not measured by how much profit it makes but by it's social impact and presence as an honored and valued institution in it's community that enlightens the citizens in an entertaining and thought-provoking way, raising the quality of their lives. The idea is that simply determining the success or failure of an arts institution by the business standards of profit/loss is stupid: that's not what art is about.
By extension, I have come to see that almost everything in our lives (including our beloved game) has become infiltrated by profit/loss standards of measurement, or some other neo-business ethics... New projects, different ideas, original thoughts are quashed/celebrated based on their cost effectiveness and convenience. Too expensive to produce a new book? Chop out a couple chapters and then we can talk. What about 18 songs on the CD instead of 15? Sorry, too expensive. But make sure you get it done by June because we will maximize our profits if we can make the Christmas rush... Who cares if you can't find a ski cap in January because all of the stores are now carrying their spring lines? But do we really need to purchase Christmas ornaments in September? Or, on the extreme end, we couldn't possibly afford to produce that life-saving cancer drug because our profit margins wouldn't be big enough for our stock-holders. And your nephew will just have to suffer because the insurance company won't pay for that ear surgery.
My point is (and I'm sorry if I lost some of you), way way WAY too many decisions in our lives are already made for us due to business ethics of profit/loss. And as gamers, it sticks-in-our-craws that a major source of our entertainment is being undermined by a business that can't see anything except in terms of larger profit margins. What is really as issue here is that we feel our game has become simply a product to be shunted around from company to company, and that's not how we feel about it on a personal level. D&D is a major part of our lives, and it hurts to see that the company who controls it doesn't feel the same way. Simply put, it's a product owned by an impersonal company that will never see it from the personal perspective we all do.
My frustration, and I think a lot of you feel the same way, is that we are tired of seeing D&D treated as something we feel it shouldn't be. To us, it's not simply a book to sell and make a profit from, and we yearn to see it in the hands of a smaller company that perhaps would feel the same way, approaching our hobby as we do: a creative personal expression that allows us to have an entertaining social experience with friends.
It's great when you can make a living doing art, but as any artist knows you don't do art to make a living: you do it because you have to--you simply don't have a choice. I suspect some of us might think of D&D in the same way, and don't think twice about adding that great supplement to our long wish list of future purchases.
And it's just plain sad what has happened to it.
--Coreyartus
I have just spent the last couple of hours reviewing this thread, and I think I finally realized something.
Think about this:
I work in the arts. Theatre to be exact. There has been a long-running debate on the national level that business practices have killed artistic expression, that a good theatre is not measured by how much profit it makes but by it's social impact and presence as an honored and valued institution in it's community that enlightens the citizens in an entertaining and thought-provoking way, raising the quality of their lives. The idea is that simply determining the success or failure of an arts institution by the business standards of profit/loss is stupid: that's not what art is about.
By extension, I have come to see that almost everything in our lives (including our beloved game) has become infiltrated by profit/loss standards of measurement, or some other neo-business ethics... New projects, different ideas, original thoughts are quashed/celebrated based on their cost effectiveness and convenience. Too expensive to produce a new book? Chop out a couple chapters and then we can talk. What about 18 songs on the CD instead of 15? Sorry, too expensive. But make sure you get it done by June because we will maximize our profits if we can make the Christmas rush... Who cares if you can't find a ski cap in January because all of the stores are now carrying their spring lines? But do we really need to purchase Christmas ornaments in September? Or, on the extreme end, we couldn't possibly afford to produce that life-saving cancer drug because our profit margins wouldn't be big enough for our stock-holders. And your nephew will just have to suffer because the insurance company won't pay for that ear surgery.
My point is (and I'm sorry if I lost some of you), way way WAY too many decisions in our lives are already made for us due to business ethics of profit/loss. And as gamers, it sticks-in-our-craws that a major source of our entertainment is being undermined by a business that can't see anything except in terms of larger profit margins. What is really as issue here is that we feel our game has become simply a product to be shunted around from company to company, and that's not how we feel about it on a personal level. D&D is a major part of our lives, and it hurts to see that the company who controls it doesn't feel the same way. Simply put, it's a product owned by an impersonal company that will never see it from the personal perspective we all do.
My frustration, and I think a lot of you feel the same way, is that we are tired of seeing D&D treated as something we feel it shouldn't be. To us, it's not simply a book to sell and make a profit from, and we yearn to see it in the hands of a smaller company that perhaps would feel the same way, approaching our hobby as we do: a creative personal expression that allows us to have an entertaining social experience with friends.
It's great when you can make a living doing art, but as any artist knows you don't do art to make a living: you do it because you have to--you simply don't have a choice. I suspect some of us might think of D&D in the same way, and don't think twice about adding that great supplement to our long wish list of future purchases.
And it's just plain sad what has happened to it.
--Coreyartus
Ranger REG
Explorer
Well, make that intern sweat and have the remaining SRD sections (draft already provided by Ryan Dancey) finalized yesterday. And that includes the Vitality/Wound health system.Zulkir said:
drakhe
First Post
Staffan said:
Thanx for the details, makes stuff a lot clearer.
Doesn't remove the potential though. Hasbro can still
sit on the license, chocking it to death. Lets just hope
there civilized about the whole deal.
Why am I so scared? Because its suits making the decision
and I've had bad expieriences before. A couple of yours ago
we were also bought by another larger company and they promised us NO CHANGES. Well, 5 years later: were bledding to death!
BiggusGeekus
That's Latin for "cool"
Re: The Quandry
That is a beautiful sentiment. I agree with it fully.
It's only happened when all D&D RPG products released are junk. And that hasn't happened yet. WotC may not be the publisher (or heck, maybe it will, it isn't like the current staff have been lobotimized), but the OGL/SRD will ensure that gaming will continue. There are several fine companies out there that have good games. I think we're covered.
Look, when some guy publishes a game about Confederate Dixies weilding laser swords and riding T-Rexes -- under the D&D rules! -- that's a sign that everything is in good (if not weird) hands.
Coreyartus said:
That is a beautiful sentiment. I agree with it fully.
It's only happened when all D&D RPG products released are junk. And that hasn't happened yet. WotC may not be the publisher (or heck, maybe it will, it isn't like the current staff have been lobotimized), but the OGL/SRD will ensure that gaming will continue. There are several fine companies out there that have good games. I think we're covered.
Look, when some guy publishes a game about Confederate Dixies weilding laser swords and riding T-Rexes -- under the D&D rules! -- that's a sign that everything is in good (if not weird) hands.
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